Seven time nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at the True Crime Awards, Independent Podcast Award and The British Podcast Awards, and voted 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-SEVEN: This is Part 1 of 2 of Evil Little Droog.
From 1976 to 2003, Peter Allan Foster of Bridlington committed a string of vicious and brutal attacks on his girlfriends and wives, including holding them hostage, kidnapping them at knifepoint, strangling, beating, shooting, coercion, and two counts of murder. But how did he evade justice for so long, and what has any of this got to do with his obsession – the 1973 film, A Clockwork Orange.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: Welcome to Murder Mile: Unleashed. (Engine) And I’m away. Goodbye London. Hello Britain. And as I cruise the UK’s canal network in my little boat, I shall bring you true crime cases from the cities, towns and villages I visit. Following last week’s case, we examine whether a different double murderer was inspired by ‘A Clockwork Orange’. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 357: Evil Little Droog – Part 1 of 2. (Cue intro to film) “There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence”. And with that, the 1972 film ‘A Clockwork Orange’ opens with a stark close-up of the story’s unblinking narrator and “hero”, Alex DeLarge, sat staring directly at us as if he’s daring us to fight. Dressed in a set of overalls, braces, boots and a bowler hat, his attitude is writ-large by his fashion; white overalls implies a blank canvas onto which society imprints its rules and conventions upon the youths, braces and bowler hats to mock the establishment, black combat boots to unite the gang as a rebellious army, a codpiece on the outside of their trousers giving a threat of sexual violence, and (for Alex) a single eyelash to his right eye giving him an eerie doll-like look, and a three-foot cane concealing a blade. Like James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause and Marlon Brando in The Wild One, Alex DeLarge became a 1970s icon for many maladjusted youths, who like him; dressed to cause an outrage, spoke in a slang only they understood, partook in a era’s drug of choice, and rebelled against society’s stifling control. Hanging around with a gang of undesirable droogs - Dim, Georgie and Pete – Alex’s psychotic motives “being the adventures of a young man whose pursuits are rape, Beethoven and ultra-violence” reflect every parents fear of each generation’s youths being subverted by something they don’t understand, whether junk food, drugs, hip-hop, horror movies or computer games. Yet, although Alex’s crimes are the epitome of extreme, he proved to be a character who was weirdly aspirational for many youths. But did this violent film turn a man into a monster… …or was the monster merely using this violent film as an excuse for his crimes? By 1974, society had made up its mind about the film, ‘A Clockwork Orange’, which was sporadically banned by draconian local councils who – like fascists burning books - had censored what the people could and couldn’t see, thus eradicating any free will in an ironic nod to the moral of the book itself. A wealth of crimes were unfairly blamed on ‘A Clockwork Orange’, as if the innocent were corrupted to become evil having seen the film, when even if they had copied its style, evil will always be evil. In 1973, five youths were convicted of gang-raping a 17-year-old Dutch girl in Lancashire, it was said they had sung ‘Singing in the Rain’ in a nod to the gang’s rape of the author’s wife. Six youths also went on a crime spree speeding across France like the droogs do in a Durango 95; beating, burgling and committing copy-cat crimes directly lifted and mimicked from scenes in the film which culminated in a murder. And as explored in last week’s episode, 60-year-old homeless man David McManus being beaten to death by Richard Palmer, a horrific recreation of the infamous ‘tramp’ scene in both sources. With the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick receiving death threats, each had sealed its fate for the next three decades, being banned in the UK until Kubrick’s death in 1999. But by banning it, that only made the hype to see it more dangerous and thrilling, and cemented its place in history as a censored film. But there was another, less well-known ‘Clockwork Orange Killer’ who was inspired by the film. On the 27th of March 1956 in Germany, Peter Allan Foster was born. Few concrete details exist about his upbringing, so it’s hard to pin down who he really was, before he began mimicking Alex DeLarge. Nothing was written about his mother and his father (Ronnie) struggled to care for this anxious youth, so as a toddler, he was sent to live with his grandparents (Mr & Mrs Emmerson of Harrington Road) in the seaside town of Bridlington, East Yorkshire. But proving to be “more than a handful”, Foster spent many of his formative years in care homes and an approved school for behavioural problems. Like Alex DeLarge, he had little respect for his guardians, his education was broken by truancy, he held down part-time jobs as a mechanic at a fairground and a doorman at Scarborough caravan park, and although he was never diagnosed as mentally unwell, like Alex, he also had two sides to his personality. As a 6 foot, 14 stone muscular youth with a Dennis Nilsen-like vibe, it was said he was charming but admitted “I was an angry young man, insecure and frightened… incapable of controlling my violence”. Like Alex, his violence was vicious and unprovoked, with the beatings he meted-out being so severe, his victims were too scared to speak out, but whereas Alex was a full formed psychopath, Foster’s early crimes were pathetic in comparison, yet it’s clear that the film had a big impact on his motives. Foster’s known offences go back to 1968 when he was 12, but in 1973, aged 16 he saw ‘A Clockwork Orange’ at the cinema, and that same year - as a coincidence or maybe down to drink or hormones - his violent offending increased. And although the film was banned in UK cinemas, available in Europe, pirate copies on VHS and Betamax were sold cheaply in pubs, shops, in car boots or by mail order. Foster was said to be obsessed with the film which he watched religiously and could quote verbatim, as well as another 1972 X certificate film, Bruce Lee’s violent martial arts actioner ‘Enter the Dragon’. In 1977, Foster was described by his solicitor as a ‘paper tiger’, “someone who appears powerful and threatening, but is weak, ineffectual and unable to withstand a challenge”. With 63 convictions to his name, many were minor; like driving his scooter without insurance and while disqualified, a drink drive ban for crashing his Skoda into a hedge, and in 1986, he was given a six-month suspended sentence for tampering with his electricity meter and damaging the front door of his former girlfriend’s flat. But with his actions grounded in rage, his violence grew more psychotic, later being convicted of GBH, ABH, weapons offences, stabbing, torture, false imprisonment, child pornography and the assault and cruelty to a 6-year-old boy. Yet the most brutal and violent crimes he committed were against all of his wives and girlfriends, often mimicking ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and culminating in a double murder. Fear was his weapon of choice. At his trial, having overcome their terror of giving evidence against him, Andrew Campbell QC for the Prosecution stated to Foster: “you have four partners that leave you because of the threat of violence and flee because they are terrified of what might happen. And you have two partners that don’t flee… …and they end up dead in your bed”. Lindy Derham was born in Oldham, they met in 1974 when she was 16, he was 18, and he chatted her up while he was working on the dodgems. Like many other girlfriends, he was said to be handsome and charming, he played the guitar, could quote Shakespeare, and spoke to her of astrology and love. But her father, Clive, saw through his facade. In April 1974, Clive was convicted of assaulting Foster repeatedly punching him in the face, stating “I lost my temper and went for him (because of) what I had heard about his relationship with another girl”, it was unclear what this was, but seen as “an act of desperation… for his daughter’s welfare”, Clive was fined just £25 at Bridlington Magistrates Court. Like other relatives of Foster’s ex-partners, Clive would do anything to protect his loved ones, but with Lindy moving into a flat with Foster in Bridlington’s Old Town and marrying him in June 1975, either she believed that she loved him, or – with the abuse having already begun - she was too afraid to flee. Always carrying a knife in his Doc Martin boots, he regularly beat her and threatened to cut her from ear to ear. Once when she’d angered him, he burned all of her clothes in the bath. Like his other hero, Bruce Lee in ‘Enter the Dragon’ he often left her face and body black-and-blue having been attacked with kicks and chops, and he once punched her so hard in the stomach, that their baby miscarried. Believing he was Alex DeLarge, the leader of the droogs who the law didn’t apply to, she often saw him standing in front of the mirror dressed in overalls, boots, braces, a bowler hat and a single eyelash, and she would recall “he would play the soundtrack of the film”, whether the William Tell Overture or Beethoven’s 9th symphony, “and his eyes would change into a menacing look” and spew a violent rage. By 1976, having endured three years of pain, Lindy tried to flee, but with Foster working alongside her at the arcade, following her wherever she went, and threatening to kill her when she went back to her father’s house, later claiming that he had seen her embrace another man, he planned to hurt her in an identical way to how Alex had attacked Dim, the Droog who’d deceived him in A Clockwork Orange. In the famous scene where Alex and the droogs walk along the docks, feeling double-crossed by his subordinate Dim, Alex beats him, knocks him into the water, and when Alex extends a seemingly sympathetic hand to Dim, from his cane, he pulls out a concealed blade and slashes Dim's hand open. That Christmas Eve, as Lindy was walking with Foster to midnight mass, perhaps quoting: “For being a bastard with no manners and not a dook of an idea how to comport yourself public-wise, my brother”, Foster pulled out an umbrella with a sharpened tip, stabbed her in the torso, and like a coward, fled. Bleeding profusely, Foster returned to take her to intensive care, not to ensure she survived, but to secure his alibi by getting her to tell the nurses that she’d fallen on a set of railing, and although he’d stabbed his wife and risked her life, with his crime unspoken, Foster wasn’t charged nor questioned. Having fled his grasp, one year later on the 17th of December 1977, Foster was dragged kicking and yelling and smashing from Lindy’s solicitor’s office, having begun divorce proceedings against him. As the two male officers manhandled him, they found strapped to his back, a set of rice-flails known as nun-chucks as used in ‘Enter the Dragon’. Stopped before he hurt someone else, Foster was fined £20, bound over for a year, and the magistrate “seriously considered sending him to prison”. But didn’t. All of his wives and girlfriends lived with “an over-riding fear of him which stopped them from making complaints”, but Foster would never hurt Lindy again, as although he was unable to accept that the marriage was over, his solicitor stated “while he was in custody, he had received a letter from his wife, which made him realise there is no chance of reconciliation”. Lindy never saw him again, and she lived. In Foster’s eyes, ‘A Clockwork Orange’ wasn’t just a film, it was a way of life. The violence he slavered over on-screen was nothing compared to reality, as Alex DeLarge said “oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh... and you could viddy it was real... not like a film, but a terrible, terrible real thing", as blood thrilled him, as much as recreating scenes from the film did. In October 1978, it was reported in the Hull Daily News “police and firemen were called to a woman’s house in Bridlington after her grandson went berserk with a guitar”. Like the narrator of his own story, he stated “I’d had a few drinks and was keyed-up mentally. I had a brainstorm, I picked up a guitar she had bought me and smashed it on the floor. I then took it into the bedroom and smashed it through the window”, and having barricaded himself in the bathroom, he threatened to set the house on fire. Foster said he was depressed, and blamed it on his divorce. Almost a year later, while still living at his gran’s house on Medforth Road, being blind drunk, Foster was sent to prison for three months for the assault of a Policeman having been stopped for riding a suspected stolen bicycle. Throughout Bridlington, Peter Foster was – to the outside world – a nothing, a nobody, a ‘paper tiger’… …but as his violence against women was unreported, nobody saw this powder keg was ready to erupt. In 1979, released from prison and working as a doorman at a caravan park in Scarborough, Foster met Margaret Manningham who was on a weeklong family holiday. Having fallen in love with him, within weeks they had moved in together to a flat on Trinity Road, and in July 1980, they married. It was far from the dream she must have imagined, as his abusive control had begun within those first weeks. Many ex’s stated he’d undermine them, making them feel inferior without him “he’d say that my body had gone, that it was all flabby and unattractive” and threaten “‘no-one could have you after me’”. For him, women were there for sex, as Alex DeLarge says “the first thing that flashed into my gulliver was that I'd like to have her right down there on the floor with the old in-out, real savage”, they were nothing but “young ptitsas on their bolshies, very starry-eyed” who adored him like a rock star or God. Everything he did was to control her; he beat her when she displeased him, he humiliated her so she felt worthless, held her hostage in her wardrobe to prove that he owned her, even chaining her to the radiator like she was his possession, and owning her free will, he’d strangle her until she blacked out. On their one-year anniversary, Margaret recalled “I realised if I didn’t get out, something awful would happen”, so as they toasted their marriage in the pub, she pretended to go to the toilet, but hid on the fire escape until the pub had shut, then fled 300 miles to Bournemouth, and filed for a divorce. Margaret never saw him again, and she lived. Andrew Campbell QC said “Foster had a consistent pattern of domineering behaviour”, all of his wives and girlfriends were terrified, “and believed he would kill them if they did not do as they were told”. In early 1982, he met 17-year-old secretarial student Kathryn Portelli, when he was 26. As before, it began with a façade, she said “he was very nice, intelligent. He’d quote Shakespeare, I was impressed”, and having moved into a flat in Little Beck Road, his charm gave way to abuse, coercion and violence. Kathryn said “I wasn’t allowed to have a mind of my own”, she wasn’t allowed to see her friends, and she was beaten and kicked, once while she was pregnant. She wasn’t a person, but his little play thing. One day, the lodger, Paul Jepson found Kathryn outside their flat, tied to the drainpipe. “She started crying. I went to untie her… Peter came out, and told me not to, He said ‘it’s better that I do that than hit her’”, as in his words “she’s doing my head in”. Foster eventually untied her, and it was forgotten. One night, having displeased him, he punched her, kicked her and dragged her to the bedroom. Tying her hands behind her back with a belt, he ripped out a lamp, and having wound the bare electric wires around her neck, he threatened to flick the switch, and electrocute her if she moved an inch. Kathryn said “I really thought I might die that night. His demeanour was very aggressive. His teeth were gritted. He was talking strange”. He left her tied up, shaking and terrified on the floor, and having placed lit candles around the bed, “he laid with his arms across his chest, sleeping all night”, like he was a deity. Kathryn recalled “I thought he was going to kill me”, and not for the first time. One time, at his father’s house near Leeds, Foster threatened Kathryn with a samurai sword, chasing her around the house, until Foster’s father (Ronnie) stopped him and drove her to her mother’s house. But Foster had followed her. At her door, he pleaded, professing that he loved her and that he would make everything right, but as she stepped outside, “he put my arm up my back and put a knife to my throat”, and frog-marched the pregnant women, at knifepoint, back to their flat. Tied up with rope to her hands and her feet, “I was terrified”. He kept her on a small camp bed in the corner of the room “for the rest of the night, all the next day and half the day after. He only untied me to go to the toilet”. And for the next few days after, with a knife in his pocket, going shopping, he had her handcuffed with a jacket over them, Kathyrn said “people thought we were courting. I was too scared to ask for help”. He controlled her mind, her body and her being… but her hope wasn’t entirely sapped. On Sundays, when he was at the pub, she secretly smuggled clothes out of the house, and having made arrangements with a women’s hostel, and while attending an ante-natal class, she fled. “I never saw Peter Foster again. I changed my name. Only my mother, my father and my priest knew. I feared if anyone else knew where I was, he would kill me”. Kathryn never saw him again, and she lived. In court, Foster denied attacking her with a sword, making her sleep on a camp bed, putting a knife to her throat, making her wear handcuffs and he said he only tied her up for “half an hour”. He admitted punching and kicking her, but claimed in his defence, “I was inexperienced. I should not have been in a relationship”, even though he was 26, had been married twice, and may have had several children. By 1984, Foster was dangerous, deranged, and on the hunt for another girlfriend. Julie Dixon was 18-years-old, Foster was 28, as being a coward, he needed these girls to be young and impressionable, lured in by his charm and easily broken by his abuse, coercion and delusions. Being drunk, day-in, day-out, he worked very little, and they lived in a commune where many druggies lived. Julie said “He was aggressive, strange, often when the music of A Clockwork Orange was playing, the aggression would start… his eyes would change and he would have a menacing look”. But not only did he break her face and body with his fists, as like so many others, he also broke her spirit. “Early in our relationship, he said he had been possessed by a priest… he spoke a lot in Latin, a language I didn’t understand” and would recite Bible verses in reverse under a pentagram he had drawn in the kitchen. As silly as it may seem to those of us who weren’t been broken by his mind-control, “Peter claimed he could astrally project himself… he said he could leave his body at any time and find me using his psychic powers. I believed him. It made me feel like I would never be able to escape, as long as I lived”. And when his beatings and coercions waned, to keep her under his boot, he resorted to deadly threats. With a modified Colt revolver, he forcedher to play ‘Russian Roulette’. With one bullet in the six-shot cylinder, “Peter went first, spun the chamber and chose to point the gun at me. I think it was at my head. I thought I could die. When he pulled the trigger, it was empty, it just clicked”. With five shots left, when it was Julie’s turn, “I thought, if I pointed it at him, I would be responsible for his murder… but if I pointed it at myself, then I would be dead”. With the gun aimed at her head, “I pulled the trigger. It clicked”. It did this four more times, as with the revolver having never been loaded, Foster didn’t want her to die, what he wanted to see was the terror in her eyes, as her life lay in his hands. Sometimes his threats were deliberately theatrical, and other times, they were brutally simple. From the second-floor window of their bedsit on Marlborough Terrace, holding her by just her throat, “he was strangling me. If he had let go, he would have dropped me. I would have fallen to the steps below”. Julie made several attempts to flee, later stating “I was totally afraid of Peter, but when you are with someone like that, you don’t provoke them”, so having secretly smuggled money, clothes and her passport out of the flat in binbags, she paid the shopkeeper downstairs to put them into a taxi to her parent’s house, “and I got as far away from him as I could”. Julie never saw him again, and she lived… …but not all of his girlfriends would be so lucky. When the Detectives later appealed for witnesses to his abuse, several brave women – his ex-wives Lindy and Margaret Foster, and ex-girlfriends Kathryn Portelli and Julie Dixon - set their trauma aside, came out of hiding, and often using their new or real names, they faced him in court. Their truth would put an evil man behind bars, but for three other girlfriends, his arrest and trial would come too late. Linda Moreen Chapman Peacock was born on 2nd of December 1950 in Bridlington, one of four sisters and a brother to Stuart & Iris. Described by her sister, Meril, as “beautiful, lively, lovely and talented”, she met her husband, Robert Grimm at a studio in London in 1970 when he was a professional guitar player for Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. They married a few years later, lived in Bridlington, and moved to America with their three daughters – Athena, Beth and Lyra, but separating in 1988, Linda Grimm (as she was now known) returned to her hometown of Bridlington, where she met Peter Foster. He lived in the flat opposite her on Midway Avenue, she was charmed by him, in June 1989 they moved in together, and said “Linda was bright, intelligent, artistic, and good fun, everything you could want. I loved her”, but like so many other girlfriends and wives, she was seen with black eyes and bruising. To one of her friends, while drunk, he admitted “I hit her, cos I lost it”, but to everyone else, as they both had a drink problem, this was his excuse of choice, stating “she was a staggering wreck around the flat. Many times I put my arms around her to stop her hitting herself”, this also became his alibi. On Monday the 17th July 1989, Foster claimed they went for a walk at Bempton, a 400-foot high series of cliffs overlooking the sea. They were both drunk, she fell over a stile, and falling hard, she bruised her head, face, torso and thigh. They returned home to Midway Avenue, and she fell asleep, comatose. The next morning, at around 6am, Foster woke, and found Linda dead. (End) Hungover and rambling, Peter Foster entered Bridlington Police Station stinking of drink. He told them about her accident on the stile, and how 38-year-old Linda Grimm had died in her sleep. Without any witnesses to any argument between them, with no signs of a struggle in the flat, and as he hadn’t a criminal record for assaulting his ex-wives or girlfriends, the Police accepted his version of events. As an unexplained death, an autopsy was conducted by Dr Lloyd Denmark, who noted she had died of “shock and haemorrhage due to a rupture to her renal vein and right kidney which had split in half, an extreme trauma only seen in road accidents”. He also noted she had 21 other (unexplained) bruises to her chest and groin, and six broken ribs. But with her blood test showing she had “320 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood”, meaning she was “four times over the legal drink-drive limit, it was agreed that because of her alcoholism”, her injuries and distended organs could have been caused by a “forceful blow by someone dropping their full weight on the abdomen”, or she fell off the sofa. With the autopsy unable to conclude whether she had died of natural or unnatural causes, and with any reference to “significant trauma caused to her” being less prominent in the report, it was easily glossed over by those who needed to see it, and Foster was released by the Police without questioning. As a trained pathologist hadn’t listed her death as ‘suspicious’, in August 1989, her body was cremated at Scarborough Crematorium, and any evidence of the murder of Linda Grimm was lost forever. She had died in agony, having been sadistically beaten and abused by this violent thug for months, and in a scene, reminiscent of the film ‘A Clockwork Orange’, he had deliberately attacked and killed her. The murderer of Linda Grimm walked free, like Alex DeLarge, Foster’s hero in his favourite film having murdered the ‘cat lady’ by beating her to death for his own pleasure. Quote: “and the very next day, your friend and humble narrator was a free man”. But what connected these two killings? The Police wouldn’t know for another 13 years, when Foster killed again, being inspired by ‘A Clockwork Orange’. Part Two, the final part of Evil Little Droog continues next week. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. 
Archives
July 2026
Subscribe to the Murder Mile true-crime podcast
Categories
All
Note: This blog contains only licence-free images or photos shot by myself in compliance with UK & EU copyright laws. If any image breaches these laws, blame Google Images.
|